GroundFloor Media Teams With Children's Hospital Colorado to Speak Up for Kids

Did you know that 170,000 Colorado children do not have basic health care? GroundFloor Media's Amanda Brannum recently sat down with Deb Federspiel from Children's Hospital Colorado's Children's Health Advocacy Institute (CHAI) to talk about our partnership, funded by The Colorado Trust, working together to reach mothers and families throughout Colorado to inform, educate and encourage families to speak up for better access to health care in Colorado. Learn more about the program and how you can get involved at www.childrenscolorado.org/speakup

When bad things happen to good brands

If you kept up with the news over the weekend, you are surely aware of the sudden resignation of Sunflower Markets CEO Michael Gilliland following allegations of child prostitution. As the old saying goes, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only hours to tear it down – and this case is no different. One of GroundFloor Media's crisis experts, Gil Rudawsky, sat down to outline some of the lessons learned from this situation, including some of the following highlights:

• Revisit your crisis communication plan
• If you don't have a plan – it's a great time to get a crisis communication plan in place
• While planning, brainstorm the unimaginable. As you can tell from the headlines in the paper, the unimaginable happens more than you might think.

The Power of Your Network: Get Connected Women Entrepreneurs Event

Recently, GroundFloor Media hosted a Get Connected event for about 30 local women entrepreneurs. I was joined on a panel by Mindy Gantner from eXplore Communications, Laura Levaas of Yelp, Remy Spreeuw of 5280 and Taylor Woodard of Motive. We spent a few hours in small breakout sessions talking about career experiences, lessons learned and tips for building brands and communicating with media and other key stakeholders. The participants represented owners of multiple businesses including Eat (delicious catering, BTW), MaxLife Therapies, United Martial Arts and Fitness Center, Sticky Fingers Cooking, Studio R Designs and many, many more.

I was inspired by the stories I heard and the willingness of the women to share all of their ‘growth pain’ stories with the larger group– the good, the bad and the ugly. Since I started GroundFloor Media in April 2001, I have relied on my network of women to help guide me and serve as my informal ‘kitchen cabinet’ on issues that face many entrepreneurs – woman or man. How do you juggle work and family life? How do you know when to take on an employee that isn’t billable to a client? How do you purchase real estate and structure contracts with sub tenants? How do you manage the complexities and struggles of a divorce while building a business and raising a young child? While I am grateful to the male advisors I have surrounded myself with primarily through my involvement with EO Colorado, it is generally the women in my life that offer the necessary story telling and the fact giving that provide those coveted words of wisdom. In my experience, women have never been afraid to mix business and personal lives because they tend to know that – for an entrepreneur – the two can’t exist without one another. And women aren’t afraid to tell you just how hard – and rewarding – this life we have chosen can be.

This ability to view situations from both a personal and professional lens is a critical component to owning a business. The grey areas are vast and the inability to recognize that aspect can take down a company. I wonder if this is one of the many reasons that the growth of women-owned firms outpaces those for men – according to a new Department of Commerce survey . In fact, the number of women-owned businesses increased 44% from 1977 to 2007 and added 500,000 jobs. Meanwhile, the number of man-owned businesses increased 22% and lost 2 million jobs. Why? Well, there are probably many reasons. However, if the Get Connected event was any indication, I believe it is because women inspire one other to take chances. Thanks to all of the women in my kitchen cabinet who have inspired me to take a chance or two. It has all been worth it.

~ Laura Love-Aden

The Black Swan

As a child, my father would often try to explain his job and teach me about how the stock market works. I would always get lost in his example of trading fictitious pencils and erasers, but the part about bull and bear markets – or upward and downward trends – made sense. Bulls were rambunctious and bears lumbered, plain enough.

So, I was surprised while reading The Wall Street Journal when I came across an entirely new term, “black swan,” to describe drastic market upheavals, such as the Sept. 11 attacks, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the 1987 stock market crash – wait, I thought that was “Black Monday” – OK, this is all becoming very confusing.

The article described that the term black swan hails from the historic belief that all swans are white – a claim that was obviously false when European explorers discovered black swans in Australia.

The gist: Anything is possible. In fact, big surprises are more common than people think.

This notion caused me to think about the current upheaval in media and communications, largely wrought by the rise of the Internet. Newsrooms are shrinking, user-generated content continues to dominate online channels, and now Facebook has launched Places as a new location tracking service, the likes of Gowalla and Foursquare, to find friends and share your location with the rest of the world. But that’s a whole other blog post!

Stock market investors have the benefit of hindsight in knowing that financial markets will ebb and flow, and also rebound from dramatic black swan-type events. But not since the printing press have we experienced such dramatic change in communications. What will become of this current upheaval in the way we distribute and share information?

I imagine that more is to come in mobile communications and that both traditional and new media content sources will need to be even savvier at delivering news and information to small-format devices. I also expect the ongoing convergence of home entertainment and computing technology – whether it’s broadcast-quality TV from our laptops or computing from our flat screens. This is one thing that “Back to the Future II” got right.

Regardless, it’s safe to say that media and communications are in for continued black swan moments and that we shouldn’t expect a return to the past with a bear market any time soon.

So as PR professionals, this constant change translates into a new way of doing business. We cannot rely exclusively on a toolkit of proven best practices. To stay ahead of our industry’s own black swan moment, we need to continue to evolve our skills and use new and emerging resources to the best of our ability to meet the needs of our clients.

As an example of this new paradigm, our client Qdoba Mexican Grill recently launched a new campaign to fight burrito boredom – check it out! The campaign combines word-of-mouth marketing with online surveys and social media to keep burritos top-of-mind – a good example of how our jobs are evolving to get you (and reporters) to think differently about new and existing products and services.

(Source: Kim, Jan J., The Wall Street Journal, "Preparing For The Next 'Black Swan'," Aug. 21-22, 2010.)

~ Kimmie Greene